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5 Tricks ‘n Tools To Automate Online Marketing And Save A Whack Load Of Time

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Guest post by Jane Hurst, https://www.lifehack.org/author/jane-hurst & https://blog.getresponse.com/author/jane-hurst

Online marketing can get pretty complex, so when you're a small team, or flying solo, you need all the tricks you can get to make things easier and faster.

This article gives you five ideas to save as much time as possible, by using online tools which automate or speed up time-chomping tasks.

#1: Setup Email Marketing Workflows

Since email marketing is the cornerstone of most online marketing efforts, it can take up huge amounts of time. Every serious business owner needs to use email marketing software to generate automated emails, but you can take that one step further and at the same time, create a more effective process, by using sophisticated marketing automation.

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With a marketing automation tool like GetResponse, create sophisticated, effective, targeted email workflows based on user behavior.

By using marketing automation software like GetResponse to set up workflows, create personalized customer journey experiences. Set up workflows that trigger specific actions based on the user's behaviour, for instance, if a subscriber clicks on a certain link in an email, they will receive a certain message. This makes the process individualized and targeted, which is more effective. What this essentially means for you, is more sales.

All you'd need to do, is set up the workflows in the software. Once that's done, it runs by itself, without you needing to lift a finger. The two greatest benefits of using marketing automation software, is a) increased sales, and b) higher productivity.

#2: Create Cart Abandonment Workflows

On average, 69.23% of consumers abandon their shopping carts. Of those, it's been found that 58.6% are generally browsers who use the shopping cart feature as a "wishlist". They are close to making a buying decision, but not quite yet. (Source) 

After that, the highest legitimate reason for shopping cart abandonment is due to extra costs like shipping, handling, etc.

Now, once your visitor drops their cart, they may never visit your site again. Unless of course, you have created a workflow that engages with them to lure them back. It would be foolish not to engage with them once they drop the cart, because if they've added goods to a shopping cart, they're a qualified lead; they may not be ready right now to buy, but they are in the last phase of the marketing funnel, and ripe for the picking. If you don't catch 'em, somebody else will.

By adding a cart abandonment workflow, you won't need to worry about what's happening with abandoned shopping carts, because the system will be working to save as many dropped sales as possible.

#3: Schedule Social Media Posts

Posting on social media is part of basic online marketing, but takes up a lot of unnecessary time. There are plenty social media scheduling tools, but many of them don't have all the features necessary to really save time. 

For example, to gain a good Twitter following as fast as possible, you'll need to tweet about 15 times a day. The easiest way to do that is to regurgitate published blog posts, but to be effective, most tweets need a customized image, and once the tweet - with image - is posted, it should be used again, but scheduled. How do you easily keep track of your tweets, images and how do you schedule them, and how to do all this in the least possible amount of time?

Using a free tool like IFTTT, you could create applets, or recipes, that do the heavy lifting for you. One applet you may want to use, is to build a social media calendar between Google Calendar and Buffer (a social media tool); every time you publish a post on Buffer, the applet automatically sends it to Google Calendar. To create an ongoing wheel, find an applet on IFTTT that sends Google Calendar entries back to Buffer.

You could also set up applets that send posts to accounts directly from Pocket as you save them, or via Feedly. It's best to take a look around and see what others are already doing with the IFTTT tool.

Using IFTTT again, monitor industry trends and news, or even competitors with Google Alerts, saving the details in a spreadsheet for future access. 

Get alerted when people mention your competitors, so you can keep tabs on what they are up to, which will inspire you. 

Tweak and use the applet from here.

#5: Design Custom Images Fast

To get attention on the Internet, videos are the ultimate. Regardless, any social media update you post needs an image - a customized image - for maximum effect. And of course, designing customized images for all the written content you produce, is time consuming.

Whether you're a pro graphics designer or not, sometimes all you need is to create a customized image, fast. Lucky for you, there are free online tools that help with this. For instance, Canva provides specific sized templates that can be used as the base of a custom design, so creating an image for Facebook posts, for instance, becomes a breeze. 

Placeit offers high quality video templates and images where your logo can be super-imposed on the photo, like this:

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Summary

We're all battling for time. Online marketing can be time consuming, and the small business or soloprepreneur feels it the most.

It pays to set up your systems, and get organized, because once that's done, the systems you use will do all the hard work while you keep busy at some other task that can't be automated.

To summarize, here's what will help:

  1. Set up automated email workflows.
  2. Save abandoned business by creating cart abandonment workflows.
  3. Schedule social media posts by using a combination of tools and creating applets on IFTTT.
  4. Keep abreast of industry news, trends or competitors by getting IFTTT to automatically send details to a spreadsheet.
  5. Create custom images fast with online tools that make design a piece of cake.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2017
    You could also try out SocialPilot https://socialpilot.co/ . The best automation tool I’ve worked with until now. You can connect to 9 social media networks, and share as many as 500 daily posts and connect 200 profiles with just one SocialPilot account and that too at really cheap rates. It has features like Custom FB Branding, Bulk Scheduling, Never-ending feed content and suggestions, team collaboration upto 20 members and much more.